Spit Delaney's Island (23 page)

All through the business of the separation Stella was as kind as you
could expect, she was always considerate and never raised her voice to me
once or did a mean thing or tried to get more than anyone would agree she
had coming to her. You wouldn't think there was a spiteful bone in her
body, except for her one or two comments about Old Number One and the
way I couldn't get over her. What I don't understand is
what happened to
her over the winter
? While I was trying to get used to this whole new way
of looking at myself and fighting the urge to just chuck it all and go off
somewhere new, and dreaming the damnedest nightmares,
what was happening to her
? I don't believe that if you chop all the arms and legs off a
man and a woman and thrown them both into a brand-new country where
they don't know the language, I just don't believe the woman would be
any faster at adjusting than the man. It doesn't make sense. I can't believe
that while he is lying around waiting for new legs to grow on and hoping
to die, that she would decide legless was what she'd always wanted and a
new language was as good as the old. It doesn't make any sense to me. I
would just like to know what was happening to Stella Delaney over those
winter months, between the time I moved off the place, and the time I
took her out for dinner in May of this year.

I should've just kept out of it. But you get used to remembering your
wedding anniversary and doing something special on it, and it's not something you can just ignore, even when it shouldn't mean anything any
more, so I phoned up Stella in the middle of May and told her let's go out
to supper somewhere to celebrate the first wedding anniversary we've
ever spent as a Separated Couple. She told me it would probably be a big
mistake, but if it was that important to me, she couldn't see any reason
why not. What I shouldn't have done was let her pick the place. I'd forgotten already about that part of Stella, the part that never remembers to
think how
I'd
feel in a place, and also the part that told her the way to
prove she's as good as the best of them is to spend as much money.

It rained all the day of our anniversary, and blew too, but when I drove
up to get her, it started to clear. All those brown sag-bellied clouds split, to
let sun in, and then peeled back like gobs of gauze, leaving streaks and
fluffs behind to turn pink and brownish-red over towards where the sun
would set. I remember because I was nervous as hell driving up to get her,
and had a good look at the sky to get my mind off it. But I knew, oh I
knew the minute I saw those flaming torches outside the restaurant and
the sort of old-private-house look to the place that the whole thing was one
big fat mistake. You just couldn't imagine Spit Delaney going up those
steps and inside and eating there, it wasn't my kind of place. But it was
Stella Delaney's kind of place, she said, and went right on in so I had to
follow her.

The sight of her hair all frizzed out like a pile of steel wool was a bit of
a shock when I picked her up, but that was nothing compared to the way
I felt when she took off her coat and there she was in tight black pants and
a black top all covered with Indian fancywork and four or five different
kinds of necklaces flopping around on her chest. Stella was one of those
women who still wore housedresses when we were married, around the
house, even when every other woman we knew, no matter what age or size,
was wearing pants like a man to go everywhere even in public. She wore
flowered dresses to the day I left. I don't know what happened after that.
I'm scared to think. Forty years old and bony as an old nag and here she
was in black pants, for crying out loud, and beads. I never said a thing, I
couldn't, my throat was all closed up already from wondering how I was
going to get through eating a meal in a place like
that
, with waiters flapping around in black suits setting people's supper on fire and pouring out
wine for them to taste and nod over, and mixing the salads right out in
plain view with hands that would look better tightening nuts. One consolation, if I spilled soup all over myself, or left the waiters too small a tip,
there wouldn't be anybody from work there to see me.

Old Stella acted as if she ate there every day. You'd think the place was
built for her, you'd think the waiters had been flown in from somewhere
just to serve her. She always did think she could've been a lady if she'd
ever been given a chance. She knew which fork to use. But I could never
see her acting like that without thinking Come on lady, this is Spit sitting
here, I'm the one that's seen you walking around naked in the bedroom
and how lady are you then? How can you put on this act in front of someone who's seen the stretch-marks on your belly? And of course this time
all I had to do was think that and the next thing I was thinking was about
being in bed together and what a wild woman she could be under the
sheets if she felt like it, and wondering if before the night was out she
might admit she was missing it, too. You can't blame me for hoping. But
old Stella didn't suspect my thoughts, she was busy acting a lady. That was
the thing she knew best how to do.

She also knew how to go for the throat. The first thing she says when
we're sitting down is “Have you been taking out many women to dinner?”

None, I told her. Not one. I wouldn't know how to start.

“That's stupid,” she says. “You never had any trouble asking
me
, in the
old days.”

Well, that was because I knew who I was back in those days, or thought
I did. I hadn't been hit by all the big questions yet, or lost everything in the
world that mattered, or had the chance to find out how some women
think.

“It's a shame that you don't,” she said. “I've been inside some of the
most interesting restaurants. From one end of the Island to the other. You
shouldn't cheat yourself out of these things.”

She ordered a gigantic vegetarian kind of thing for herself, of course—what else could I expect?—and I ordered scallops with some fancy foreign
name. I like sea food. But I should've ordered roast beef and potatoes. This
stuff came in a giant white shell, scallops and mushrooms buried in a white
wine and cheese sauce. At least I could stir my fork around in it, and look
busy, without anyone knowing how much I'd left uneaten. It smelled good,
but my stomach was in no shape to receive. By the time I'd waded through
soup and salad my insides were hollering Stop.

“Really, I don't know how you can eat those things,” she said. She
dabbed at her mouth with the big linen napkin.

“Why not?” I said.

“I mean because they were alive,” she said. “It almost makes you a murderer.”

I laughed. This was something else that was new. Stella in the old days
would eat a horse while it was standing if she was hungry enough, and not
bat an eye. “Don't be ridiculous, woman,” I said. “These are only fish, and
anyway what makes you think eating that plate of carrots is any different?”

Oh man, did she look holy. “A carrot was never conscious. You can't say
it's been killed.”

Well, I had her there. “Don't be so sure about that,” I said, and who
cares if the other tables all looked up from their lobsters and bleeding
steaks and bottles of wine? “Listen to this,” I said. “I read it in the papers.”

“Please, Spit, keep your voice down.” Old Stella can say something like
that with a look on her face that would make others think she was just
telling me how much she liked a present I bought her.

So I told her about these scientists I read about, experimenting with
plants. They rig them up to electric machines of some kind, put a whole
bunch of plants in a room and then pay this guy to go in and rip one of
them all to pieces. Then they parade a whole lot of people, including this
one guy, past the plants one by one, see, one by one, and they
recognize
him.
When the fellow that ripped the one plant all to bits walked past, all the
other plants went crazy.

“Ha!” said Stella, and popped in a whole carrot to show how impressed
she was.

“Fear, Stella,” I said. “What about that? Fear for survival. What does
that say about you and your carrots?”

“I don't think everybody needs to hear you, Spit,” she says, and shoots
me one of her looks. “I'm sure the cook in the kitchen finds it interesting,
but this is hardly the time.”

It's because carrots don't have eyes, of course. If carrots had big sad eyes
like a cow you wouldn't catch her eating them either. I almost enjoyed
fishing out scallops from the sauce after that, and chewing them down.

I thought I had her stopped, she was quiet for a while. But all she was
doing was thinking of ways to get even. “I think you just cancelled out your
own argument,” she said. “And since you're so good at noticing weird
things like that, you must've seen about the man in the car accident.”

I should've said “Sure” and changed the subject. But not me, I said,
“What man?”

She had me. That look on her face. “This has happened before, but it
happened again last month somewhere. I think it was in the States. I read
it in a magazine. This was a perfectly healthy middle-aged man living a
normal life and doing his job, and he got killed in a car accident. His skull
was split open,”—she lowered her voice so the others wouldn't be offended,
or bring up their supper—“and when they examined him in the hospital
they discovered that all he had left of his brain was a tiny knot of gristle.”
I could tell by the way she held her fork just outside her lips that there was
supposed to be some great big lesson in it for me. And here it was: she said
of course it made you wonder if the brain is so all-fired important as it's
cracked up to be, if maybe our thinking don't come from somewhere else
altogether.

“You mean in the kneecaps?” I said. I had to.

No, she said, she meant
outside
. “And something else too. It means if a
man with no brains at all can carry on living a normal life and do all the
things that have to be done then
what is the matter with you
?” She put
down her fork and her knife and sat back.

What's that supposed to mean, I wanted to know. They tell me the lady
spider eats her mate when he's served his purpose; I guess I ought to consider myself lucky.

“It means don't you think it's time you stopped acting like a kid that's
been kicked out of his cradle and started building a new life for yourself?
It means don't you think I know you've been acting as if the world came
to an end, and making everybody feel sorry for you, and going around
with this martyr look on your face? It means why don't you start trying to
find your own life in
yourself
instead of behaving as if it all depended on
everyone else, and you got cheated out of your share?”

By God, I could've told her a few things. What did she know? How
would she know what it felt like to be me? She couldn't even imagine
what it's like to be locked up inside me, locked inside this. The only thing
I ever liked about my job gone, nearly twenty years of marriage and family down the drain, everything I thought was real just turned into nothing.
And not able to tell anybody about it, just locked up inside and acting out
this play for other people, and not knowing what lines to say next. By God,
I could tell her a few things.

What I should've done right then was tell her about the dream I kept
having. That'd let her know a few things. I should've told her about the
dream and how it started on Christmas night, when I came back to the
Touch-and-Go after that horrible family supper with her and the kids and
her old lady. Christmas night old Kanikiluk walks right into the cabin and
changes me zap, just like that, into a fish, a dolphin I think or one of that
type of thing, and off I go cutting arcs through the Pacific, leaping and diving and curving this way and that, all the way out past pleasure boats and
seiners and even the big foreign trawlers, all the way out to that damned
seam they told me about. Where the lava is leaking out of the crack along
the bottom, pushing the continents apart. But I never found it, I dived and
dived and looked all over the bottom with those other fish, but I never
found it and had to come back in. So I come skimming in to land as fast
as I can go, cutting through the surface, streaking up to the coast and leaping out of the waves at last and
bang
here I am beached on the dry sand
and can't move except flop around this way and that. And that's how it
ends, every time, with me on that sand, beached, neither in ocean or land.
The sun is drying me out, killing me. I should've told her that. Maybe if I
let her know the kind of dream I was having she might open up and tell
me what happened to
her
since we parted, what had made her change.

But I didn't get to tell her, because right then was when the restaurant
door opened and in stepped this woman I'd never seen before, dolled up
in the ugliest outfit you could imagine, and stands there looking around.
If I hadn't been so mad at Stella I might not've reacted the way I did, I
might not even have noticed her. What I said was “Look at that rig. Some
people shouldn't be allowed out in public.”

Well, it's true. She looked as if she just stepped out of a freak show, or
a movie. She was short and dumpy, and had on an old moth-eaten fur coat
she must've found in somebody's attic, and a long skirt that reached to the
floor, and
hair
, she had it so thick and long that fourteen families of rats
could be nesting in it. And probably were. She thought she was really
something. You could tell by the way she held her head that she thought
she was something, but she was ugly. She must've been thirty-five or more,
dressed like an insane teenager.